This invention relates to systems and methods for hand-held device pointing based upon changes in relative device orientation.
A wide variety of different hand-held devices, such as cellular telephones, cordless telephones, pagers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), solid state digital audio players, CD players, MCD players, cameras and game pads, have been developed to enable users to communicate, process information and playback digital content without being tied to a particular physical location. Hand-held devices typically include one or more input controls and a display screen that is configured to display a graphical user interface, including text and graphics. A pointer is a rectangle, a blinking underline, an arrow or other symbol that allows a user to select commands or options presented by the graphical user interface by positioning the pointer over the desired selection and entering a selection command. In general, the selection command may be entered by tapping on a touch sensitive display screen or by depressing a designated input button.
Many different schemes for scrolling a pointer across a display screen have been proposed. In some approaches, one or more input controls (e.g., up and down keypad buttons, a jog dial or a joystick) may be manually activated to move a pointer across a display screen. In hand-held devices that include touch sensitive display screens, a pointer may be moved across the display screen simply by tapping the screen location where the pointer is to be displayed. In general, manual input based pointer scrolling approaches input involve the use of two hands or require awkward hand positions to control pointer movement.
Several non-manual input based schemes have been proposed for controlling various operations of a hand-held device. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,201,554 discloses a hand-held device that includes a tilt sensor that is configured to sense changes in device tilt relative to a reference tilt that is established when a mode selection switch is activated. Depending upon the selected mode of operation (i.e., paging, volume control, brightness control, and zoom), one or more device parameters may be modified in response to signals provided by the sensor that are indicative of tilt direction changes relative to the reference tilt. In a paging mode of operation, windows that are displayed on a display screen may be paged through one at a time in response to tilt direction changes. Similarly, in a brightness or volume control mode of operation, the brightness level or volume level may be modified in response to tilt direction changes. Finally, in a zoom control mode of operation, the magnification at which content is displayed on the display screen may be control by changing the tilt of the hand-held device relative to the reference tilt. In accordance with the approach described in the '554 patent, the level or rate of adjustment of a mode-dependent parameter may be proportional to the relative change in tilt.
In a similar approach, U.S. Pat. No. 5,602,566 describes a hand-held device in which content that is displayed on a display screen may be scrolled through by changing the tilt of the hand-held device relative to a reference tilt direction and relative tilt angle that are established upon activation of a scroll start switch. The scroll direction corresponds to the direction of relative tilt, and the scrolling speed may vary in accordance with the relative tilt angle.